When we got reindeer, we moved to live to the tundra : The Spoken and Silenced History of the Yamal Nenets

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ACTA278

ACTA ELECTRONICA UNIVERSITATIS LAPPONIENSIS 278

Roza Laptander

When we got reindeer, we moved to live to the tundra:

The Spoken and Silenced

History of the Yamal Nenets

LAPTANDER WHEN WE GOT REINDEER, WE MOVED TO LIVE TO THE TUNDRA: THE SPOKEN AND SILENCED HISTORY OF THE YAMAL NENETS

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Acta electronica Universitatis Lapponiensis 278

ROZA LAPTANDER

When we got reindeer, we moved to live to the tundra:

The Spoken and Silenced History of the Yamal Nenets

Academic dissertation

to be publicly defended with the permission of the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Lapland on 29 April 2020 at 10 a.m. The public defence is to take place online at:

https://connect.eoppimispalvelut.fi/vaitos/

Rovaniemi 2020

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University of Lapland Faculty of Social Sciences

Supervised by

Research professor Florian Stammler, Arctic Centre, University of Lapland Senior Lecturer Tatiana Argounova-Low, University of Aberdeen Reviewed by

Adjunct professor Jarkko Niemi, Tampere University

Professor Andrei Golovnev, Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography of the Russian Academy of Sciences

Opponent

Professor Andrei Golovnev, Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography of the Russian Academy of Sciences

Layout: Taittotalo PrintOne

Cover: Communications and external relations Acta electronica Universitatis Lapponiensis 278 ISBN 978-952-337-200-9

ISSN 1796-6310

Permanent address to the publication: http://urn.fi/URN:ISBN:978-952-337-200-9

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Acknowledgments

Writing this book was a long and interesting journey, that developed me as a researcher, and gave me a great opportunity to meet and work with many interesting people.

First of all, I would like to thank my supervisor Dr. Florian Stammler for all the inspiration and support of my work, from the very beginning until the end. Dr.

Stammler has not only been a great supervisor, but I should admit that it was Florian, who introduced me to this fascinating world of social anthropology and supported my every step in doing research about the Nenets spoken history. I highly appreciate all his moral, practical, intellectual, financial support, and motivation to continue writing further through the all parts of the dissertation. Furthermore, with his help I got the last chance to finish this thesis from the University of Lapland.

I am sincerely grateful to my second supervisor Dr. Tatiana Argounova-Low from the University of Aberdeen, for all the important advice and comments, which further developed my research and also my academic way of thinking and writing.

My special thanks to prof. Piers Vitebsky for understanding of importance of my work and encouraging me to finish it. I am grateful to two pre-examiners of this dissertation prof. Andrei Golovnev and Dr. Jarkko Niemi for their important comments and remarks, which helped me to develop this work further.

Many thanks to prof. Bruce Forbes for invitations and financial support of field works on the Yamal tundra. I say thanks also to all members of the Arctic Anthropology team in Rovaniemi, especially to Dr. Stephan Dudeck, Dr. Nina Meschtyb, Lukas Allermann, Dr. Anna Stammler-Gossmann and Dr. Nuccio Mazzullo for our joint work on the spoken history of Arctic elders. I would like to thank Dr. Karina Lukin for friendship, support, invaluable help and talks about Nenets individual songs and personal stories and Dr. Laur Vallikiwi for our talks about the power of the Nenets words.

Here I would like to thank Dr. Jarkko Niemi for presenting me with his book written together with Dr. Anastasia Lapsui about Nenets individual songs. I thank Anastasia Lapsui and Dr. Elena Pushkareva for our discussions about Yamal Nenets personal stories and individual songs, prof. Maria Barmich and Dr. Tapani Salminen for consultation about writing Nenets words.

I would like to thank prof. Peter Jordan, Dr. Annette Scheepstra, Dr. Maartin Loonen, Dr. Frigga Kruse, Sarah Dresscher and Frits Steenhuisen for hosting me at the Arctic Centre of the University of Groningen.

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I thank all people who helped me with my work, gave me shelter, food and a bed in the Yamal tundra and settlement. Without their stories it would be not possible to write this book.

When I was travelling so far away from my home and country, my family was always in my thoughts. I am grateful to my mother Tatiana Laptander and my aunt Maria Khudi, my husband Onno Falkena and our daughter Anna-Meretja for awaiting me home from my long trips and all their support.

February 2020 Roza Laptander

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To Anna-Meretja

Remember your Nenets history and background

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Abstract

This dissertation is about the role of silence and silencing in remembering the Yamal Nenets historical narratives about the past. The Nenets narratives in combination with individual songs tell the history of these nomadic people of the tundra from the end of the 19^th century until the present time on the Yamal Peninsula. I argue that Tundra Nenets transmit their historical narratives, traditional knowledge, and personal experiences about the past from one generation to another not only through spoken stories, but also by leaving some things unspoken. Nenets historical stories and narratives retain a system of knowledge and values, which unite several generations.

Silence in combination with spoken words has many important meanings in any story or historical narrative which can have particular social significance and a specific role in everyday life. Although silencing makes words unspoken, at the same time, it endows these unspoken words with a more powerful message, so that silencing can both help to keep and forget memories about the past.

General aspects of oral history theory helped in comparing and giving definitions of the Nenets life stories and narrative terms, which were used in this work. The stories analysed turned out to fall into three types of silence illustrating the roles of responsibility, demands and interests of society, and the political regime of the country.

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List of transliterations

Nenets personal and family names, as well as place and rivers names, are written using the Library of Congress transliteration system for modern Russian, for example, the Nenets surname Хороля is written Khorolia, personal names Хаулы - Khauly, Ӈати – Ngati. Names for rivers are given in English translation Юрибей – the Yuribey River and Мордыяха – the Mordy-Yakha River.

Other Nenets words are based on transliteration of the Nenets orthography following Tapani Salminen’s transcription of palatal consonants.

For example: ilye”mya, in square brackets its transcription [il’emia], in parentheses it is written by the Nenets orthography (иле”мя) with the English translation in single quotes ‘a life story’.

Ya’ myidykhy ilye”mya [ja m’idihi il’emia](я’ мидыхы иле”мя) ‘an ancient story’; nyewykhy ilye”mya [n’evihi il’emia](невыхы иле”мя) ‘an old, past story’; tyakhakui ilye”mya [tiahakuj il’emia] (тяхакуй иле”мя) ‘a recent past story’; talytsui ilye”mya [tal’chuj il’emia] (тальцуй иле”мя) ‘a recent story’; yedei ilye”mya [jedej il’emia]

(едэй иле”мя) ‘a new story’.

Furthermore, to indicate the two specialized Nenets glottal stops, I make use of the apostrophe symbol: one apostrophe - ’ - for the voiced (nasalizing) glottal stop (Rus. звонкий гортанный смычный) and two - ” - for the voiced (non-nasalizing) glottal stop (Rus. глухой гортанный смычный).

Chapter 4 provides the text of an individual song, written in Latin letters with translation into English. Other texts are given in English translation.

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List of illustrations

Figure 1.1. The Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug on the map of Russian Federation. ...14

Figure 1.2. Levels of narrative research process by Riessman (1993). ...17

Figure 3.1. Diversity of Nenets stories ilye”mya. ...47

Figure 3.2. Private and collective life stories. ...48

Figure 3.3. Connection of Nenets personal stories, individual songs and collective narratives. ...52

Figure 3.4. Nenets kinship and family names. ...53

Figure 3.5. Nenets spoken and silenced stories. ...60

Figure 3.6. Do not blab! Soviet propaganda poster Vatolina N and Denisov N. (1941). ...66

Figure 4.1. Winter chums in the tundra. April 2018. Photo. Roza Laptander. ...70

Figure 4.2. Vladimir Khudi, Ngatyena Syadey (stands) and Vasilii Laptander around 1960’s. Photo. Roza Laptander. ...79

Figure 5.1. Map of the Yamal Rivers. Made by Frits Steenhuisen. ...89

Figure 5.2. Fishing Nenets. Near the Mordy-Yakha River. Summer 2017. Photo. Roza Laptander. ...90

Figure 5.3. Achamboy Serotetto with his wife and grandchildren. Summer 2014. Photo. Roza Laptander. ...93

Figure 5.4. Pubtane Puiko with her grandson. The Yuribei River Summer 2014. Photo. Roza Laptander. ...96

Figure 5.5. Nyadma Puiko in his chum near Puiko village. Summer 2014. Photo. Roza Laptander. ...97

Figure 5.6. Private, group and collective stories about the Puiko family. ...99

Figure 5.7. a, b. The Puiko fishermen. ...101

Figure 6.1. Irina Anagirichi with her grandchildren. Yar-Sale. April 2015. Photo. Roza Laptander. ...107

Figure 6.2. Reindeer herders on snowmobiles on the tundra. April 2017. Photo. Roza Laptander. ...113

Figure 7.1. Icing events and Anthrax outbreak stories. ...124

Figure 7.2. Reindeer herders meeting with regional and industrial company representatives. Yar-Sale. April 2015. Photo. Roza Laptander. ...126

Reindeer herders: children and neighbours of Achamboy Serotetto. Photo. Roza Laptander. ...160

A Nenets couple fromPauta tundra. Photo Roza Laptander. ...164

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Introduction

This dissertation is on the role of silence and silencing in oral history. Through analysing silence in the example of the West Siberian Nenets people, it offers a new approach to understanding how small societies keep memories and stories about their past. This transforms the way in which we see the unfolding in Nenets society of oral history stories and narratives about past and recent events in the tundra that live in both individual and collective memory. An important emphasis in the analysis lies on the study of the communicative functions of silence, represented through a selective way of telling stories and careful choice of a certain language: Nenets, Russian, or the ‘language’ of silence. This leads us to a more holistic understanding of how the past lives in the present in a particular society.

The principal aim of the study is to suggest a new theory of the relative role of silence and words in oral history research. In order to achieve this aim, as a research question we need to ask about the meaning of silence and silencing during narration.

• How do Nenets cultural customs of silencing stories help to remember memories about the Nenets past and give their special meaning in people’s life?

• Is there a common way how Nenets can use silence for keeping important information safe as common knowledge for open, restricted or closed access, for remembering it, but also forgetting?

• What is the influence of the dominant Soviet and later post-Soviet Russian culture with its historical background of a role of silencing among the Nenets, and what does this tell us about types of silencing common for the Nenets, and by extension perhaps also for other people of the former Soviet Union and people of the Arctic?

For answering these questions, we need to pay particular attention to the ways in which the place of silence and silencing in Nenets culture can not only depend on their function for the narrative discourse. We also need to analyse how their informative role during communication depends on demands and interests from within Nenets society.

This allows us to identify mechanisms of how individual and collective memories about past and recent history are saved within Nenets society. Understanding the history that is distinctive to the Nenets’ life stories and memories about the past, we also clarify the importance of such stories as markers of Nenets identity. Furthermore, it contributes new insights into the influence of state norms and politics towards indigenous people, which is illustrated here from the very inside of an indigenous

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society. Thus, while also taking into account the specifics of this particular situation, the present work also develops one possible way of understanding the importance of silence and silencing for research in oral history in human societies in general.

Oral history studies conducted in many countries have shown that the role of silence has been mentioned as a valuable component of oral narration. However, the role of silence has so far not been the focus of attention by oral historians in their effort to build general theoretical understandings, which also helps to explain why people hide and silence personal, group or collective memory stories (Abrams 2010:104; Passerini 1987). However, for a better understanding of oral history, it should be remembered that silence is an important component in almost every personal story and narrative. Moreover, silence has an important place within Nenets culture. While this is similar to many other Arctic cultures, it is significantly different from “Western” (including “Russian”) cultural perspectives. In Tundra Nenets culture, silence not only expresses emotions, it is also an important part of cultural norms and rules of behaviour and communication. However, the nature of Nenets silencing – the act of keeping certain information unspoken even when it is still significant – can have different backgrounds. The main research question of this work is to understand how different strategies of silence influence the informative fullness of narratives and the way that people want to recount and remember their past.

In the following chapters I shall investigate whether the silence that we observe during communication among the Yamal Nenets can be classified according to specific types, which influence not only remembering, but also ways of forgetting the past.

The Nenets represent the largest community of indigenous northern people in the Russian Federation. According to the Russian national census, as of 2010, 44,640 people recognized themselves as Nenets. The name Nenets means ‘people’.

The Nenets live along the coastal area of the Barents and Kara Seas from the Kola Peninsula up to the Taimyr Peninsula. They represent the official titular nation of the Nenets Autonomous District (okrug) of the Arkhangelsk Oblast (province), and the Yamalo-Nenets. Many of them live in Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrugs (Districts) of Tyumen Oblast, the Komi Republic and Krasnoyarskii Krai. The Nenets language belongs to the Northern Samoyedic branch of the Uralic language family. It has two variations: Tundra and Forest Nenets. The Nenets traditional economy is based on reindeer herding, hunting and fishing.

According to the Russian National 2010 Census, among the 536,049 inhabitants of the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug (henceforth YNAO) there are officially 29,772 Nenets, which is 8.2% of the total Yamal population. There are two closely interrelated groups of Yamal Nenets . The first group lives and migrates with reindeer in the tundra. The other group lives settled in the district settlements and towns. We shall see that individuals and families can move between these categories, according

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to changes in their fortune and circumstances. These two groups are well described in the works of ethnographers and anthropologists (Khomich 1976; Golovnev and Osherenko 1999; Stammler 2005; Kharyuchi 2001; Mukhachev et al. 2010;

Liarskaya 2016; Serpiwo 2016).

Figure 1.1. The Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug on the map of Russian Federation¹.

The Yamal Peninsula is Russia’s and one of the world’s largest sites for natural gas extraction. Together with the world’s highest population of domestic reindeer, this makes the Yamal a prime site for exploring relations between the Russian state, extractive industries and the nomadic population of the Yamal Peninsula (Forbes et al. 2009; Stammler 2011; Golovnev 2017). Even though the Nenets reindeer herders living in the tundra are succesful in their reindeer herding work, the tragic events surrounding the reindeer loss from 2013 to 2019 – due to the icing in the tundra and lack of food for the reindeer – forced some them to move their families closer to Russian settlements. Nowadays, the group of nomadic Nenets is one of the most vulnerable groups of the district’s population. They do not have a secure income and are mostly ‘unemployed’ (i.e they do not have another paid occupation). Many of them have no possibility of obtaining accommodation in the district settlements and villages. The only dwellings they have are chums -Nenets tents with reindeer skin covers. The only jobs they can do professionally are reindeer herding and fishing.

They are good at hand-making traditional clothes and all other necessary items required for everyday life in the tundra. As authentic Arctic dwellers, they have

1 Source: Wikimedia Commons: The Free Media Repository. By TUBS - Own work, 2010.

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developed their unique culture over many centuries and this forms the ground of their stories and narratives.

1.2. Documentation of Nenets oral history

Until the 20^th century, the Nenets language was completely oral, with only a few texts written for baptizing services by Russian Orthodox missionaries during the 19^th century (Bukvar’ dlia samoyedov 1895). Later during Soviet times, the Nenets language was further standardized. The first Latin-based orthography was created in 1931 in Leningrad (St-Petersburg). Three years later, the first ABC book for the Nenets, Jadәj wada ‘New word,’ was published (Prokofjev 1934). Later, because of the requirements of the Communist Party, in 1937 the Latin alphabet was replaced by Cyrillic script. All schoolbooks and other Nenets texts are now published in the Cyrillic alphabet (Lublinskaia and Laptander 2015). The first texts in the Nenets language and folklore were initially documented at the end of the 19^th century.

The Finnish researcher Toivo Lehtisalo, a pioneer of Nenets folklore studies at the beginning of 20^th century introduced the Nenets folklore genres, categorizing the Nenets life stories as a separate sub-class of Nenets folklore. He also noticed that within the Nenets legends and individual songs, there was a separate genre of narrated stories or personal stories which he classified under the following headings:

1) Myths and Mythological stories; 2) Sacrificial prayers or incantations; 3) Ritual poetry; 4) Shamanic songs and tales; 5) Fairy tales; 6) Epos; 7) Individual songs; 8) Riddles; and 9) Personal stories about modern life.

This classification of the Nenets folklore genres is still very relevant to the present Nenets folklore and ethnographical studies. Even there are works about the Nenets individual songs (Niemi 1999; Pushkareva 2001). However, there was a very little study done about the Nenets personal stories. There is still no any special research about the Nenets private stories of people and collective narratives about the past and the present time. Within the Nenets life stories, ilye”mya particularly, in this work I would like to show the division and gradation of the Nenets personal, group and collective narratives within the time and personal belonging to people. I also do this study within connection of personal stories to individual songs of people and their families. I confirm that Toivo Lehtisalo did not elaborate this in his works, neither any other researcher before. In the present research, I develop further studies about Nenets personal stories and describe the role of individual songs for remembering the past. It is my contribution to the Nenets oral history studies and folklore. This work is done also from the perspective of exploring the various functional roles of silence in Nenets oral history narratives and songs.

The Nenets folklore texts which were documented during the Soviet time in the 1930s by Anton Pyrerka (Pьra 1935, 1936), Osharov (1936), Viachalslav

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Tonkov (1936:38) and Grigorii Verbov (1937:4), represented the Nenets legends and stories concerning modern life in the Soviet tundra. In her books, Zinaida Kupriyanova (1960, 1965) categorized the different genres of Nenets folklore. She referred to Nenets personal stories as new narratives about contemporary life in the Soviet tundra and regarded such personal stories as a modern genre developed during the sovietisation of the tundra. On the one hand, this means that Russian researchers of Nenets folklore considered this way of narrating a personal story to be rather new (Kupriyanova 1960:19; Shcherbakova 1960; Tereshchenko 1990:26;

Khomich 1995). On the other hand, Nenets folklorist Elena Pushkareva considers it to be ancient (Pushkareva 2001). Those Nenets stories recorded during Soviet time describe the positive influence of collectivisation on the life of tundra people.

However, there are Nenets historical texts that have never been seriously studied, even though there are published Nenets texts about the history of the Tundra Nenets (Tereshchenko 1954; Susoi 1962; Golovnev 1999; Yangasowa 2001;

Pushkareva 2000, 2001; Barmich 2014; Kharyuchi 2018). People tell their stories and stories about their past in their everyday life. They give interviews for the regional newspaper Nyaryana Ngerm about their life in the tundra and settlements.

From two Yamal TV programmes in the Nenets language broadcast in Yar-Sale and Salekhard, only the second still tells about the life of the Nenets people. There are also two radio programmes per week where people tell stories and legends in the Nenets language.

The Nenets have a rich and unique oral tradition of telling stories and singing songs about the past. However, very limited research has been done on Nenets life stories and historical narratives about the past. In particular, there are many gaps in the research on Nenets oral history. At present, life in the tundra is not the same for the Nenets people as it was centuries ago. The process of transformations has influenced the Nenets’ ways of communication with one another. Their memories about the past and their interpretations and connections to people’s stories are also changing. For example, tundra people make new stories and new versions of old historical narratives to make them more appropriate for the present time.

1.3. Data sources and methodological aspects

All interviews were collected on the Yamal peninsula and in the Tundra Nenets language. The data of narratives provides a reliable source of information with common benchmarks or touchstones that represent the old and recent historical events in the tundra. This thesis emphasizes that oral history performed in the original language serves not only to convey information and knowledge about the past, but it also reflects the specifics of its narratives and the cultural features of narration.

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My work on collecting, documenting, describing and analysing Nenets oral history stories and narratives is a multi-layered process. I explain these specifics of the narrative research process as developed by Catherine Riessman in Figure 1.2.

Figure 1.2. Levels of narrative research process by Riessman (1993).

The work of collecting research data depends on one’s role in observing, attending and participating in the life of people during fieldwork. Working with interviews means not only making recordings, but also listening to people’s stories and making notes. Normally it is good to make transcriptions of the interviews after the field trip, with further translation texts into the target language for subsequent analysis.

The importance of a language as a research instrument and its distinctive role in anthropological studies was acknowledged specifically at the beginning of the 20^th century. It was the American anthropologist Franz Boas who argued that only through living with a people and learning their language that one could develop an accurate understanding of culture (McGee and Warts 1996:129). He believed that information, collected in local languages can help in getting better anthropological results (Boas 1904; Rohner 1969). Boas spent long periods of time studying the groups of Native Americans and trained his students to collect during their fieldwork, detailed empirical data about material culture, as well as, language and social behaviour. His works became known in cultural anthropology under the term cultural relativism, which argues that every culture has different ideas about the world, which can only be properly understood in terms of the people’s own standards and values (Hendry 1999:9-10). Every world language has its own cultural norms of thinking, talking, remembering and silencing. This fundamental approach about relationships of language and representation were further developed by the Boas’ students, who discussed in their works the norms of the language categories, which people use to think. Edward Sarip and Sapir’s students studied this also in connection to the analysis of cognitive specifics of speaking in native languages and bilingualism (Sapir 1983; Whorf 1956; Lakoff 1987; Pavlenko 1999). This sagacity that a researcher should learn and speak the language of people with whom he or she works was mostly oriented to Western and Russian researchers who travelled to small communities of unknown people. However, since the development of a new generation of indigenous researchers, this concept gives more possibilities

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to describe the specifics of the individual culture through the instruments of its language, specifics of communication and talks.

The Labovian narrative analysis method provides us with a better understanding of the structure of narratives (Labov and Waletzki 1997). The main motivation and consequences of using this narrative analysis is based on the aspect of selective performance of narratives, when during the process of narration any person pays attention to the focus about what to tell or not, because narratives or other discourses forms usually emphasize emotion and behavior in a culture (Linde 1993:47-48). As a result, the Labovian structural narrative analysis method allowed me to follow every narrative in the way of how people tell the main events, with further development of the events in narratives and their conclusions. In the original Labovian narrative analysis considering oral narratives of personal experience, Labov assumes the factuality of the events described or takes the degree of factuality as a problem for the analysis (Labov 2013). The present study is not concerned with postulating the independent existence of the actual events of the speaker’s life or with the study of their relation to the narratives of the events. I am not concerned here with whether the narratives of the life story describe events that actually occurred, or whether people describe occurring events accurately. More important is the fact of how the speaker presents this presentation (Linde 1993). Martin Cortazzi refers to the same approach of narrative analysis by Labov and writes about the two social functions of narrative, “referential” and “evaluative” (Cortazzi 1993). Therefore, for me, it was important to evaluate a place of silence in texts and develop an explanation for the role of silence in narratives.

My curiosity to study the Nenets stories came without a plan to check the truthfulness of these stories, as for my work it was more important to find out how people evaluate their past and tell it to others. The analysis of the Nenets oral history narratives was done on the translated text in English. The other original stories in their original language are presented at the end of this dissertation in the Appendix.

Later I came across the work of prof. Robyn Fivush, who describes the distinction between being silent and being silenced: “when being silenced is contrasted with voice, it is conceptualised as imposed, and signifies a loss of power and self. But silent can also be conceptualised as being silent, a shared understanding that need not be voiced” (Fivush 2010:88-89).

According to Fivush, stories serve as an important cultural tool for expressing feelings and beliefs in the ways in which it is possible to construct a story about any past event, which can be related to the internal representation of that experience.

This phrase led me to think that for Nenets culture it is also quite normal not to say things, which are thought to be known to other people, family members and friends. People can understand the meaning of the message of the other person, just because it is part of their shared knowledge. As in Nenets spoken history there are still parts that are silenced selectively by many people. Such stories usually have a

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historical background which explains why people want to keep their stories silenced.

Such ways of being silent can be quite normal in the tundra. While, in turn, being silenced can have different reasons and explanations, which I am going to describe later in Chapter 3.

1.4. Working with data

I have transformed selected digital audio recordings of interviews and conversations into transcribed texts. The narrative analysis includes work on transcribing stories.

Such work changes digital data both in form and in function (Halai 2007:347). This process of transformation of recorded audio data into textual form is a multi-layered process including further translation of texts into the target language for making their analysis. The conversion of field records into research texts is a theoretically complicated process requiring further analysis and interpretation of texts, which I am going to describe in the next chapter. The Nenets records were translated from Nenets into English, but also into Russian. I do not give a detailed description of the specifics of the translating of the Nenets narratives. Even though this part of the work is very interesting. However, I realized that for this dissertation it is more import to represent the description and the role of silence. For the detailed description of the specifics of the Nenets texts translation see the article Laptander 2008.

1.5. Back to the Nenets

Officially, I started my work on Nenets oral history when I was awarded a grant from the Finnish KONE Foundation for working on the project “Socio-cultural change of Uralic language minorities in 20^th-21^st century Siberia, analysed through Nenets life stories”, which I continued in January 2011 with the ORHELIA project team (Oral History of Empires by Elders in the Arctic) under supervision of Dr Florian Stammler (Dudeck et al. 2015). From 2014-2018, my field work was supported by the HUMANOR project, with project leader prof. Bruce Forbes. Later in 2017, I encountered my second supervisor, Dr Tatiana Argounova-Low, who helped me develop my research further.

Unofficially, my first introduction to Nenets oral history dates back to my early childhood. I was born in a family of Nenets reindeer herders, far in the tundra near my family’s sacred place. From my mother, I know that I was the very first grandchild of my grandfather. When he was back from his long trips on the Arctic tundra, he always asked someone to bring me to him. He tried to tell me different stories about our family. Unfortunately, I was too small to understand and remember them. Nevertheless, the most important family story is told about my Nenets name

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(I cannot reveal it here, but later I will explain why). It is the name of the woman who found my grandfather in the tundra when he was a baby. It was an epidemic year during which many Nenets people died. This woman came to visit her relatives’

camp. When she arrived there, everyone was dead except for one little boy. This woman took him with her and raised him as her own child. She supported and helped my grandfather all her life. I was born many years after she passed away. My mother told me later that when I was born, my grandfather told this story to his children. It was probably also important for him to keep memories about his own family background because he was an orphan and did not remember his mother and father. I believe that this old man could have told me more stories about our family. However, since my father passed away, we stopped having any contact with my grandfather and his relatives. I was two years old when my mother and I moved to a little Siberian town. Thereafter, Nenets culture and language moved far away from me. I got a new Russian name, a new family and never used my Nenets given name again.

After graduation from the Russian State Pedagogical University of Herzen in Saint Petersburg, I started to work on Nenets language documentation for the completion of my Russian PhD dissertation about the grammatical features of the Nenets language. I should say that during my early research, I did not pay special attention to Nenets oral history. My interest in this aspect came much later, when I met many Nenets people and collected their stories about the history of the Yamal tundra. Then I realized that these stories have a very deep connection to my own personal story.

All together they were like a long chain that returned me to the Nenets people and culture. I realised that every story has important and very symbolic meanings for the people who shared them with me. I believe that most of these stories can be the same as what my grandfather told me in my childhood but, unfortunately, I forgot. Thus, when I heard them again, thanks to the Nenets elders, I was re-immersed in the world of Nenets oral history. Some of the Nenets families even adopted me, and now I am their travelling daughter and granddaughter. This made me look more carefully at the explanations of their stories, with special attention to verbal and nonverbal ways of performance. I started to listen to messages in stories similar to Bonvillain (1993). Then I found stories that were kept silenced, but the stories of other people opened them. Furthermore, I noticed that Tundra Nenets use the official Russian language for telling stories openly, while they use Nenets for keeping their messages silent from Russians. This will be described and explained later in Chapter 3.

When I started my work on Nenets oral history, at first it was difficult for me to find the right direction on how I would like to represent the Nenets specifics of remembering the past to the world, publicly. Therefore, I published a few articles about the Nenets. However, I admit that these articles do not cover the same topic as this thesis. The Nenets’ unique ways of remembering the past, which I am going to describe further, are under the influence of modernity. Through this work I would

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like to show that the Nenets, as a small people of the Russian Arctic, are also under this influence.

When I started this research, I was interested in studying the Nenets’ ways of remembering the past, historical background stories, national and personal identity and the ways in which these are reflected in their everyday life stories and narratives.

Additionally, I had a personal interest in learning about my family background and history. In order to conduct this study, I travelled over several years to the Yamal tundra. There I lived and migrated with Tundra Nenets, talked with their elders and listened to old stories and songs about the past. I visited settlements where I conducted interviews with Nenets elders and young people. As a result, I collected a diversity of Nenets personal stories, songs, and individual, local and collective memory narratives, which prove that Nenets have a rich collection of stories about their past and modern life in the tundra in conditions of intensive industrialisation, climate change and the recent events of reindeer loss on the Yamal Peninsula.

1.6. Key storytellers and co-authors

This research about the Yamal Nenets’ spoken and silenced history was completed with the help of many tundra people who live and migrate in the Yamal Peninsula from the area of the Polar Ural Mountains to the northern top of the peninsula.

The very first person who introduced me to the history of the Nenets was my grandfather. He was a reindeer herder from the Baydaratskaia tundra. I am responsible for his and my family history by taking care of my silenced (secret) Nenets name. Another person who introduced me to Nenets history is my mother Tatiana Laptander (b.1958), maiden name Khudi. She has a rich knowledge of Nenets stories, fairy tales, and individual songs, which was passed down from her mother Alexandra Khudi (1916-1996), maiden name Laptander, whose mother was Serotetto from the fishing Nenets family from Marra-Sale on the Yamal Peninsula.

Another important person for me is my maternal uncle Vladimir Khudi (1936- 2013), the only son of my grandmother. When I started to work on collecting Nenets stories, he opened the door for me to the wider Nenets history and stories of people on the Yamal Peninsula based on stories and memories of his own experience as well as those of his mother.

I would like to say many thanks to other people who shared their memories with me:

Achamboy (Ngachmboy) Serotetto (b.1938) – son of a reindeer herder from the Yarsalinskaia tundra, Yamal’skii Municipal District. He lost his father when he was a little boy. He grew up in the village of Yar-Sale. Achamboy fished for the state fishing farm on the Ob River. Later he worked in the village as a master-builder and did public work for the Communist Party. When Achamboy married his wife, Sofia, he

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started to buy reindeer. In the 1970s, when they got enough reindeer, they moved with all their family to live in the tundra.

Vladimir (Ngesoda) Khudi (1936-2013) – son of a reindeer herder. Ngesoda lost his father when he was eight. Since that time, he worked and helped his mother and his three junior sisters. In the early 1950s, Ngesoda collected enough reindeer to live in the tundra. He worked in the state kolkhoz (collective farm), and from the 1960s, in the Baydaratskii sovkhoz (a larger collective state farm) as a polar foxhunter. He lost his job in the 1990s along with many other polar foxhunters and reindeer herders of the Baydaratskii state enterprise. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the director of the sovkhoz, Nikolai Babin, reorganized his organization. He invited all tundra workers to come to an urgent meeting in Beloyarsk to make new working contracts. Unfortunately, the reindeer herders did not manage to come to the sovkhoz’s office in time. Many of them who were absent from the meeting lost their jobs. On their working record cards, it was written, outrageously: “Fired, due to absence from the work place”. Therefore, nowadays many old reindeer herders, who had dedicated their entire lives to working for the state collective farm, cannot use their working time records to generate proper pensions.

Khauly (Khariton) Laptander (b. 1946) – son of a reindeer herder from the Payutinskaia tundra, Priural’skii Municipal District. He worked in the Baydaratskii state collective farm as a polar foxhunter for 33 years. He started to work there on November 25^th, 1965 but lost his job in the 1990s. Khauly lost most of his reindeer during the icing event of 2013-2014 and now he lives in a town of Aksarka.

Ngati Serotetto (1936-2015) – son of a reindeer herder. In 1937, his father’s reindeer herd was confiscated by the Soviet state. When his family built up enough reindeer, they returned to the tundra.

Seko Lamdo (1936-2012) – daughter of a reindeer herder. Her father was arrested as an enemy of the Soviet state. Seko worked with her mother at the state-fishing farm. In 1946, her mother died from starvation. Seko was sent to the orphanage in Tyumen. After finishing school, she returned to Yamal and married a reindeer herder. Seko got all her stories from her husband’s grandmother.

Irina Anagurichi (b.1936) is originally from the Kutop’yogan (Yer’yakha) River area, daughter of a fisherman. When her father built up enough reindeer, they moved to live in the tundra. She married a reindeer herder. Irina lived most all her life near the Yuribey River. After the icing event of 2013-2014, she lost most of her reindeer herd. Now she lives in the village of Yar-Sale.

Nyadma Puiko (1943-2017) – son of a reindeer herder from the Ob River.

Nyadma Puiko (1958-2016) – son of a reindeer herder from the Yuribey River.

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1.7. Book outline

Chapter 1 presents the central research subject and the main research questions of this work, with a special focus on silence and silencing during narration. Here I introduce my personal role in doing research on Nenets oral history narratives and on my key co-authors.

Chapter 2 presents methods and collected empirical material. This part of the work describes the specifics of my fieldwork among tundra reindeer herding and fishing people on the Yamal Peninsula. In this chapter, I discuss my work as a native anthropologist/researcher in the field, laying out the specifics of doing research among the Nenets people and the ethics of doing research in the community of one’s own origin.

A section of this chapter is dedicated to describing the analysis of the data: the transcribing, transliteration and translation of the Nenets texts. Here I give examples of Nenets stories about the past, providing details of Nenets verbal and nonverbal communication in the narration of stories about the past.

The relationship of the theoretically grounded and introduced concept of

“silence” in the formulation of a pre-planned set of research questions and results emerging from the analysis of the data could be explained by the following structure.

Chapter 3 is the theoretical part of the research where I present the role of silence in oral history. In addition, I compare scholarly oral history terminology with Nenets words for life stories and historical narratives. Furthermore, this chapter introduces the role of narrative analysis in describing the ways that Nenets tell their stories and narratives with special attention to different strategies of speaking and silencing during narration. I explain here why the Nenets describe special events in the tundra using special messages. For example, this alludes to possible communication with spirits of the tundra. I describe people’s silencing of personal names and how it helps them to remember their family kinship. Since I have a Nenets background, this made me familiar from early childhood with the main concepts of silence, common in Nenets culture. This present research gives me a chance to describe it using the scientific approach. This chapter includes a discussion of the Nenets rules of performing collective stories, with connection to individual songs and personal life stories. Furthermore, I describe the role of Nenets individual songs for remembering and forgetting stories about the past.

The significance of this part of the work lies in its typology of silence that can be noticed in Nenets everyday communication.

Chapters 4, 5 and 6 present a series of case studies that reveal a range of situations in which stories are silenced. In particular, these examples develop our understanding of the roles of three types of silence within spoken narratives.

In Chapter 4, I introduce the notions of telling and silencing a special type of knowledge, based on four examples of Nenets personal stories, individual songs

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and historical narratives. Here I discuss how Nenets people share knowledge and remember their main conception of living and surviving in the tundra. However, the Nenets consider individual songs to be private, following strict rules governing their performance. While these individual songs comprise an important part of Nenets collective memory stories, they cannot be told openly to everyone. These songs describe special events with special messages, for example, about possible communication of human beings with spirits of the tundra. Stories about individuals discuss the importance of supporting one another, and the rules of hospitality and forgiveness.

Chapter 5 represents a collection of stories about one historical event in the tundra. This chapter shows how the Nenets describe their past as a collection of family stories and collective historical narratives about one particular tundra family tragedy. This example shows that societies remember their past not only by personal stories, but also as collective memory narratives. Here I discuss the relevance of speaking or keeping silent when it comes to stories of local Nenets community history in connection with stories about individuals and their family members. Such stories also introduce the Nenets’ traditional customs for hunting in the tundra and fishing in the sea. From these stories, people learn lessons about possible dangers that humans can incur by way of punishments from the spirits. In this chapter I describe how the Nenets collectively opened a silenced story, not for remembering - but for forgetting it, by this way they broke their silenced agreement to keep it safe.

Chapter 6 shows how the tundra people may silence their stories due to fear of the state. Here, a series of interviews is presented about two recent tragedies in Yamal:

the icing events and the anthrax outbreak in the tundra. Based on selected examples of interviews, I show the difference among Nenets people in terms of how extreme situations such as tragedies of reindeer loss are discussed. During my work, I noticed that tundra people are very careful about discussing their problems on the record. I think the possible explanation is that tundra people consider this to be dangerous for their safety. On the one hand, they believe that the icing was a natural disaster that nobody can intentionally create. On the other hand, reindeer herders believe that the anthrax outbreak was a special action of the state to reduce the number of reindeer. Yet, reindeer herders are hesitant to say this on record because they cannot prove it. In addition, they speak overcautiously with the regional authorities about the difficulties and problems of working with reindeer and fishing.

In Chapter 7 I discuss the meaning of contemporary silence and silencing, which were detected during research with a detailed explanation of their nature and different roles in the Nenets life.

In the conclusion (Chapter 8) I summarise my research results on Nenets spoken and silenced history, mainly illustrating the transformation of the Yamal Nenets’

individual memories about special tundra events into contemporary collective memory narratives with different roles of silence and silencing. In addition, my work

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on ‘unpacking’ silenced stories helps to describe the role of religion, the meaning of emotions, and the importance of forgiveness, embarrassment, protest and fear in the life of the Yamal Nenets.

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2. Working with Nenets Oral History:

Data Sources, Methods and Reflections

2.1. Introduction

To collect data for my research during the period from 2010 until 2019, almost every year I made one or two trips to the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous District, Western Siberia. Quite often, I was in the Priural’skaia tundra near the Polar Ural Mountains and in the Yamal tundra on the Yamal Peninsula. In the Yamal tundra, I lived with Nenets families near the Yuribey, the Mordy-Yakha, and the Ob Rivers. I conducted part of my fieldwork in villages, especially during the Reindeer Herders’ Festival days, which bring many reindeer herders together into villages. I attended this festivity mostly in Aksarka, the administrative centre of the Priural’skii Municipal District, and Yar-Sale. Altogether, I made around 300 hours of audio recording of Nenets stories and narratives about the past.

The preliminary analysis of the linguistic situation among the Tundra Nenets in the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous District revealed three groups of language speakers. In the first group are Nenets elders who mostly speak Nenets in their everyday life. In the second group are middle-aged Nenets elders. They represent the largest number of my respondents. I collected most of my interviews in the tundra from reindeer herders who live and migrate in the tundra with reindeer, but there is also a smaller group of fishing Nenets. Furthermore, I collected interviews in settlements from Nenets elders who moved from the tundra to live in the Russian- speaking villages or towns. Many of my respondents were bilingual Nenets-Russian speakers. During my research, I noticed that the Nenets are very skilful in code switching, using their bilingual skills selectively to speak in Nenets or Russian. As in many other multi-language communities, the Nenets categorize the functions of their languages. The choice of one of these two languages during face-to-face communication or interviewing orients people as to the topics about which they can talk openly (Halai 2007; Deckert and Vickers 2011:161). The young Nenets who live in Russian-speaking environments speak only the Russian language, while Nenets children who have spent their early childhood in the tundra and are studying at the boarding schools can speak Nenets. However, they prefer to speak Russian, which is the language of their education and everyday communication with their peers (Laptander 2008, 2011).

When I conducted interviews with Nenets elders and young people, I spoke both Nenets and Russian. This allowed me to evaluate the different position of these languages in Nenets society. For all of my interviewees, Russian is the official

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language of communication, even though Nenets may be the everyday language of communication between family members and friends. Yet, while some important parts of people’s private stories can be told in Russian, for many of my Nenets respondents it was easier to tell stories in their vernacular language. I recorded a diversity of individual and traditional Nenets songs performed in the Nenets language. Additionally, I managed to collect very old Nenets legends and myths.

During my interview collection, I talked to narrators when they felt comfortable speaking in a natural and spontaneous way. I conducted the interviews in my respondents’ chums or in their apartments with people they knew well. It is a pity that I did not make video recordings; this was because tundra people usually do not like video cameras. However, when I used a voice recorder, people were more relaxed telling stories and they did not even pay attention to the recording equipment.

Of course, there are interviews in which people asked me to leave their stories anonymous. There were also cases in which narrators asked me to stop the recording when they did not want their words to be recorded.

The tundra was the most preferred place for my respondents to tell me their stories. In the tundra, people feel more comfortable and free to speak in Nenets.

They prefer to use this language to tell their personal stories and historical narratives about life in the tundra, its people and the stories about them. I also noticed that the Nenets traditional way of narrating the past helps them remember stories about the past.

During my work, I came across many nuances and difficulties collecting narratives from Nenets people, even as a member of their society. Sometimes people did not want to reveal personal stories that they have tried to keep silenced. In place of their personal life stories, some elders chose to tell me stories about other people.

It is common everywhere. People prefer to talk about other people’s secrets than to reveal their own! This phenomenon made me look for an explanation for why people would try to keep some of their stories silenced. I should say that it was not always possible to determine the reason for silence in stories when people were silent during interviewing. Especially during my first interviews with elders, I did not know why they would suddenly stop talking and make a long pause, apparently as if thinking about something. I thought that I was not correct in asking them my question, so I would attempt to change the topic of conversation. However, I later realized that I would have better respected this silencing by remaining silent myself, waiting for people to continue their story or to move on to another one – that is, recognising their silence as a necessary part of their telling.

Nenets personal stories and collective narratives have many important meanings in Nenets society. It is important to note that my Nenets background gave me several advantages in understanding and describing the Nenets specifics of speaking and silencing stories and narratives about the past. However, it took me a long time to understand the place of silence and silencing in stories. Due to

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the specifics of my work on collecting interviews, I was also a main listener of all recorded stories.

It must be admitted that studying silence in situations of communication, even, or perhaps especially in the insider position, was challenging. It is not an easy task to describe all the possible moments and roles of silence and silencing during communication. Moreover, I must say that all findings and conclusions in this research were made from the perspective of my interpretations of Nenets texts and individual songs. I observe and describe in this thesis the types of silence which got my attention, as I wanted to understand already from my early youth why Nenets elders did not want to tell us young people all the truth about the past. However, since I collected some stories about the past, I was astonished, because they do not tell the same information that I knew from my Soviet childhood about the historical past of the tundra. This work developed also my critical way of thinking about what is written in the official historical texts and narratives, but also what people can say between the lines, which also represent a special type of the silencing of the half-said.

This work is not dedicated to psycholinguistic studies of speech. Here I studied the life of ordinary people, told in their everyday stories and narratives, and have retold them to the wider audience of world people, who can also be familiar with similar situations and circumstances of keeping silence. This in turn, helped to clarify the possible contents and meanings of the unsaid by observing the occasions of silence during the acts of communication.

Therefore, my work developed my personal ability to listen to other people and their stories. How I collected these stories also gave me a better understanding of why people did not reveal everything in their stories, leaving something unsaid, silenced.

During my work of analysing and describing stories and narratives, I also paid special attention to Nenets traditional norms of speaking and silencing in personal stories, and individual songs, observing the occasions of silence during narration. In this way, my work of analysing Nenets stories and narratives helped me to formulate a description of the specifics of speaking and silencing the past in Nenets culture. In the dissertation, I have tried to concentrate on the concept of meaning, why people could keep unsaid some parts of their stories, even if other people around could know them. Therefore, for me, it was helpful to talk to other people and ask why this or that person did not want to tell his or her life story. Here in this work I describe my position of an insider and try to understand different meanings of such silencing from a personal perspective. I should say that my Nenets background helps me to understand the possible reasoning for keeping silence and silencing. However, only specialist literature gave me the theoretical explanation and description of silence, as part of cultural communication, which helped me to describe and explain the Nenets types of silence in Chapter 3.

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2.2. Limitations and benefits of doing anthropology at home

In 2009, I went to the tundra to conduct my first fieldwork. I was in the Yarsalinskii Reindeer-herding Brigade 2. I recall that I introduced myself as a researcher, and I also said that I had a Nenets background. People welcomed me very warmly. My hostess gave me the Nenets female reindeer clothes – yagushka. I noticed that by changing my Western clothes into Nenets, I also received a new role as I was included in the everyday life and work of the camp. I was supposed to do the same work that all Nenets women did inside and outside of the chum before and after migrations.

I would go gather wood for making fires and bring water into the tundra. I helped hold the rope to keep reindeer in the corral before migrations. Even though I did not know how to drive a reindeer sledge and how to work with reindeer, I received four reindeer and a sledge for the next migration. My host was kind enough to give me a good reindeer harness, even though I did not know how to put it on the reindeer properly. I do not silence the fact that it was a very tough summer for me. During this time, not only did I have to become fully Nenets, but also in the process to learn how to live and work in the tundra like an ordinary Nenets woman. I realized that I had to learn this by watching how people do this and listening to what they told me.

Therefore, the main instruments of my research were my eyes, ears and memory to remember things I saw, heard and talked to people about. This experience taught me that doing research among one’s own nation works very differently from doing the same research in a non-native country. It also showed the benefits and limitations of doing work in the home environment. This anthropological approach, known as anthropology at home (Abu-Lughod, 2010; Mughal 2015), is also called native anthropology (Tsuda 2015). As it was noted by Garner (2016), there are many positive and negative nuances to doing research as a member of one’s own society. In the academic world, there is a common belief that insiders cannot recognize specific cultural patterns of everyday life, while outsiders would pick them up right away (Bernard 2002; Hart 2010). However, I disagree with this belief because working at home with members of one’s own nation can be more beneficial and productive with respect to new findings and results (Bernard 2002: 350; Yow 1997), although it does come with many limitations (Kondo 1986; Kikumura 1998; Kharuchi 2010; Tsuda 2015). Nonetheless, this approach helped me a lot in completing the present research about the Nenets spoken and silenced history. It also changed my previous attitude about my Nenets background and helped me to construct my personal identity as a member of Nenets society. Moreover, it developed my professional skills as an oral history researcher. I also noticed since my first years of work that there were many limitations and responsibilities regarding all personal stories I collected from the Nenets people. I even collected common collective memory stories about the past, but I will only publish those for which I received permission from the people to publish. The ethical considerations of my research made me believe that these

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individual songs, personal stories and collective narrative interviews have their own personalities and very sensitive backgrounds.

This attitude towards them helped to develop my manner of critical thinking about selected topics: which stories I can tell to the world, and which stories I need to keep silenced. Some people told me very personal stories because I became their good friend and family member. Some Nenets elders adopted me as their travelling daughter, and therefore, they also shared their silenced (hidden) family stories with me.

In regard to the restrictions of doing research at home, American anthropologist Akemi Kikumura (1998) described her personal experience of the influence of her Japanese background on the process of doing anthropological research among Japanese people. I found that those advantages and limitations faced by Kikumura during her research as an ‘insider’ in Japanese society are quite similar to mine. At the same time, I realized that I completely agreed with her conclusion that the data she had managed to collect could never have been collected by anyone other than a member of her family and a person of her nation. At the same time, I faced situations in which people said that there was no need to tell me stories about people whom I know from my childhood. Therefore, as has been discussed by other researchers, it is better to establish a distance from the insider’s position and simultaneously become an outsider inside the community (Shaglamova 2010; Kharuchi 2010). Kikumura also noticed that proponents of the insider perspective are based on knowledge of the language, intuitive sensitivity and empathy, and understanding of the culture and people. My status as an insider helped me to peel away some layers of secrecy hidden in various different ways and silenced during performance. Therefore, later after placing peoples’ life stories within a broader social, historical, and cultural context, I began to re-examine and reinterpret them from the perspective of what people want to tell about their past and what they are silencing in their stories. At the end of this work, I redefined my own self-concept within the people-positive framework of their life, with all of its difficulties and changes (Laptander 2017). What I also noticed during my research was that some of the Nenets narratives could have their own place in which they can be told, in what manner, and to whom. For example, there are stories that one can tell aloud outside on the open tundra. There are also stories that are closed and can be whispered only inside the traditional Nenets dwelling, chum. Some of these stories are so intimate that they will forever remain unsaid.

There are stories that are open to only to few people who live together. Such stories keep a shared understanding that does not need to be voiced, which joins people by common memories about their background, a place of living, or by a common tragedy. They are informative because of the familiar names of people or places and have strong historical associations only for this group of Nenets people. Whereas for outsiders, these stories do not provide much information. I should acknowledge that my complete participation in Nenets life in the tundra helped me to document some

When we got reindeer, we moved to live to the tundra : The Spoken and Silenced History of the Yamal Nenets

Roza Laptander

When we got reindeer, we moved to live to the tundra:

The Spoken and Silenced

History of the Yamal Nenets

When we got reindeer, we moved to live to the tundra:

The Spoken and Silenced History of the Yamal Nenets

Acknowledgments

To Anna-Meretja

Remember your Nenets history and background

Abstract

Table of contents

List of transliterations

List of illustrations

Introduction

2. Working with Nenets Oral History:

Data Sources, Methods and Reflections